Printers, Blackboard experience temporary outages

An unexpected outage affected the campus student network, including Internet access and printing services, on Monday at 9:15 a.m., according to a recorded status message by the University’s Office of Information Technology support and operation center. The OIT system was temporarily down, a variety of network services were interrupted temporarily and printers in clusters were disconnected from the network.

OIT did not post an official alert on its website. However, the office tweeted at 9:32 a.m. on Monday that there had been a network outage and that administrators were working to restore service.

The cause of the problem is assumed to be a power failure in an OIT facility, according to an email sent to the Department of Neuroscience at 10:16 a.m. on Monday.

Bradley Berman ’16 said he experienced difficulty printing around 10 a.m., although he did not know that it was a campus-wide problem.

“I went to print something out from my computer, and then it said it cannot connect to the printer. So I went downstairs to the computer clusters to print it out again from the cluster computer,” Berman said. “When I logged in to the release station, the station computer said it’s not connecting to the network. I restarted the release station computer, but it still gave the same error.”

Berman also noted that he found out about half an hour later that the University’s Blackboard system was not working either, a problem several other students had reported.

Grace Lin ’16 said that she tried multiple printers on campus but could not find a single printer working.

“I was trying to print out a part of my problem set for my 11 a.m. class. I didn’t know about this OIT outage but I basically tried every printer in the science buildings, and then I went back to Wilson to print, but it wouldn’t work,” said Lin.

Lin is a senior writer for the Street section of The Daily Princetonian.

The printers were reconnected to the network around 11:30 a.m., and the Blackboard system was accessible even before that.

“These things happen, and there’s not much that can be done about them if they happen unexpectedly,” Berman said, noting that the incident was fixed quite quickly. “A lot of times printers go out in various areas, not network-wise but just specific printers, even in places like Frist, and they won’t be fixed for a couple of days.”

OIT’s Associate Chief Information Officer and Director of Support Services Steven Sather did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article inaccurately stated the exact time when OIT published a tweet about the network outage. The time was 9:32 a.m. The ‘Prince’ regrets the error.